A couple of month’s back I presented a 5-level
assessment framework based on our book 8-steps to innovation. It depicts
characteristics of an organization as it goes from level-1 (Jugaad) to level-5
(Excellence). One question that I got asked on this was, “What are we trying to
improve in the first 2-3 levels? And then in the next 2-3 levels?” This article
is a response to this question. It presents a two dimensional view of
innovation maturity – the first dimension being “creative confidence” and the
second dimension being the “incubation effectiveness”. I believe it provides a
simplified and yet useful view of innovation maturity. Let’s first understand
the two parameters and then the sequence of focus.
Creative confidence: Creative
confidence represents the capacity of the organization to identify and frame
problems and create responses (ideas) to the problems. One popular proxy
parameter for creative confidence is “idea per person per year” and another one
is “participation” typically measured as a percentage of employees giving at
least one idea in a year. An ultimate test of the creative confidence is, “Does
janitor submit ideas to improve things?” Of course, creative confidence for a
senior manager or a Product Architect would involve different type of problems
and solutions than that of a fresher.
Incubation effectiveness:
This parameter measures the effectiveness with which not-so-small ideas get
incubated and selectively implemented to create business impact. Organizations create
a separate lab to incubate typically large impact ideas. Sometimes an incubation
team sits within a business unit and another team sits outside the business unit
– under corporate umbrella. A lead indicator for incubation effectiveness is
the total value of ideas under incubation and a lag indicator is “percentage of
revenue coming from ideas incubated in last 3-5 years”.
Kaizen vs Lab corner: If
you are in the kaizen corner, it means you are generating & implementing
lots of small ideas. However, you are doing a poor job of incubating big ideas.
If you are in the Lab corner it means you are doing a good job of incubating
big ideas but doing a poor job of improving existing products / services. In the
Daily-rut corner you are doing neither. Ideally you want to be in the
Excellence corner.
An innovation journey could begin in any of the two directions. However, I feel that helps to build a critical mass of people (say 30%) confident of innovating. This increases the chance of sustaining the initiative. We have looked at how organizations like Cognizant build creative confidence. In the next few articles I want to explore what it means to run incubation centres effectively.